Marketplace of the Marvelous (17 page)

After three months in Brattleboro, Mary became the resident physician at the New Lebanon Springs Water Cure in New York. But the rigorous physical demands of the work proved too much for her. She moved to New York City in 1846 and began giving lectures and writing articles and books on health and hydropathy. Twenty women signed up for her first series of twenty two-hour lectures on the structure and function of the body. That same year, 1846, her
Lectures to Ladies on Anatomy and Physiology
, first published in 1842, earned a second and much wider printing, as well as a positive review from the poet Walt Whitman and even the regular medicine periodical the
Boston Medical and Surgical Journal
. Edgar Allan Poe, writing in
Godey's Lady's Book
, praised her enthusiasm and speaking skills, proclaiming her “in many respects a very interesting woman.” Mary's evident charms and reformist impulses attracted a variety of writers, philosophers, musicians, and artists to her home, including Poe, who
recited “The Raven” in her living room, but also social reformer Albert Brisbane. Mary Gove's clear and rational writing greatly enhanced the popularity of the water cure, and her references to the medical works of Hippocrates, Galen, and French physiologist Francois Magendie inspired reader confidence in her breadth of medical knowledge. Rather than adopting inaccessible medical jargon, she followed in the path of her fellow hydropaths and medical irregulars like Thomson. She appealed to the intelligence of her readers and spoke plainly to educate patients and practitioners. Mary continued to treat patients, many of whom traveled across the country seeking her services and advice. Though she'd never attended medical school, by the late 1840s, she led a doctor's life and had earned a reputation as a trustworthy medical expert.
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Things were looking up in her personal life, too. Mary's husband, Hiram Gove, finally consented to a divorce in 1847. That same year on Christmas Eve, she met a young writer named Thomas Low Nichols, whose writing and progressive views on women she admired. The two married the following July. Inspired by his new wife's work in hydropathy, Thomas enrolled in medical school to study “the very errors and absurdities” of regular medicine, graduating from New York University with a medical degree in 1850.
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While residential water cures and the personalized services of practicing hydropaths like Nichols did attract the wealthy and famous like Mark Twain, Brigham Young, Susan B. Anthony, and Catharine Beecher, hydropaths consistently emphasized the importance of keeping their cures affordable. Yet, in the mid-nineteenth century, the average cost of a visit to a water cure ranged from five to fifteen dollars a week with additional charges for other services. Some institutions offered discounted rates to those patients who brought their own food and washed their own clothes. Even so, a visit to a water cure remained out of reach for many Americans, who could ill afford to miss work and spend half a month's wages on a week's worth of care. Most of those who could afford to visit a cure could also afford other kinds of health care, including regular medicine, so both regulars and hydropaths competed, at some level, for patients of a similar socioeconomic class.
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But, unlike regulars, hydropaths also made a philosophical commitment to accessibility and stressed the value of home care. Like the Thomsonians, hydropaths strongly believed that everyone should
have access to health care and medical knowledge. They also recognized the pragmatic benefits of domestic hydropathy in spreading the water cure as widely as possible. Many hydropaths published home medical manuals and guides for self-doctoring that detailed the kinds, timing, frequency, and duration of baths required for particular illnesses, as well as information on exercise and diet.
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Hydropathy translated well to home use because of the responsibility it placed on patients for affecting their own cure. Passivity had no place in hydropathy. Patient cooperation and dedication to the process was essential, no matter where treatment occurred. Unlike regular medicine, hydropaths deemphasized the authority of the physician in favor of creating independent patients able to diagnose and care for themselves. Patients thus had a substantial responsibility for their own outcomes. “If a patient thoroughly understands his or her disease, and has the requisite energy to accomplish a cure,” wrote Mary Gove Nichols, “it may be done almost anywhere, and with very meager advantages.” She recounted stories of female patients who managed to heal themselves even while weak with disease through their own “indomitable energy.”
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Hydropaths believed that hygienic habits were best mastered through willpower and self-control, an ideology that mirrored wider societal beliefs about personal responsibility and social improvement. While this had the potential to render ill health a personal and moral failing, adherence to a system placed some but not all responsibility for healing on the efficacy of the system itself. Self-care allowed everyone to participate in hydropathy, and the success of the treatments, whether achieved at home or at a water cure, were widely publicized and given equal treatment in hydropathic journals.
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Empowering people to care for themselves went hand in hand with hydropathy's rejection of university training as a prerequisite for practicing. Hydropathy was far less hierarchical than regular medicine and even other nineteenth-century irregular systems like homeopathy, in part because hydropaths never sought professional medical status. Anyone could practice hydropathy and find success, including the self-taught. While some debate arose in the 1850s over whether to establish uniform credentials and standards, proponents arguing that it would improve care and patient outcomes, hydropaths never seriously acted on the issue and it did not come up again in an organized fashion. Most hydropaths believed that the only qualifications
necessary should be a personal commitment to the principles of hydropathy and a willingness and ability to practice them responsibly.
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Clearly, these principles and hygienic living were intended to eliminate the need for drugs and heroic therapies, and many hydropaths did insist that water cure and regular medicine shared no common ground or interests. But rather than compete directly with regular medicine, hydropaths instead believed that regular medicine would naturally fade away as it became increasingly irrelevant in the face of rising universal health and social harmony.
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Despite the egalitarian views of many hydropathic practitioners, in 1851, Mary Gove Nichols and her new husband, Thomas Nichols, opened the nation's first hydropathic medical school, the American Hydropathic Institute, in New York City. Concerned about the dangers of the misapplication of cold water, not to mention charlatans masquerading as hydropaths for profit, the Nicholses believed that the potency of water required expert guidance. They hoped their school would make water-cure training more formal and respectable—a more professional alternative to regular medicine. Similar efforts continued among some hydropaths until well after the Civil War, most notably in New York City, where Russell Trall opened his New York Hydropathic School, later the Hygeio-Therapeutic College, in 1853. The Nicholses' school offered a full medical course in anatomy, physiology, chemistry, surgery, and obstetrics and had all the necessary plumbing for a complete hydropathic education. Students could also visit hospitals, clinics, anatomical museums, and medical libraries in the city for additional learning opportunities. More than teaching about water, though, Nichols wanted to provide a medical education for women to meet the national demand for female doctors.
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With few exceptions, most of the nation's medical schools refused to admit women. Elizabeth Blackwell had only been admitted to New York's Geneva Medical College on a technicality after faculty passed the decision of whether to allow her admission on to the all-male student body. As a joke, they voted yes, and Blackwell matriculated despite the opposition of most of the students and faculty to her presence.
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At the American Hydropathic Institute's inaugural ceremonies, Mary Nichols delivered an address entitled “Woman the Physician” that argued for the importance of female doctors. Rather than reject cultural assumptions about women's caring nature, she claimed women's innate talents uniquely qualified them for the profession.
“Women are peculiarly fitted to practice the art of healing . . . [because of the] tenderer love, the sublimer devotion, the never to be wearied patience and kindness of woman,” she proclaimed.
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Thomas echoed his wife's sentiments, writing in the
Water-Cure Journal
that women's “diseases have been the subject of mercenary speculations, of mischievous medications, of torturing mechanical inventions, of nameless brutalities, and detestable charlatanism” with “little or no relief.”
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Enrollees in the American Hydropathic Institute understood from the start the reformist goals of its founders, and the Institute's first graduating class included nine women and eleven men.
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The Nicholses' progressive views of women aligned perfectly with hydropathy's expansive view of women and women's health. Hydropaths shared their era's belief in women's softer, more caring nature: they just did not see this as a justification for keeping women out of the medical profession. At the time, regular medicine tended to regard being female as a disease in and of itself. Ruled by reproduction, women were deemed irrational, intellectually inferior, and emotional, and their biological processes treated as illnesses in need of containment. Physician Edward Johnson, who used hydropathy alongside heroic therapies, fumed that regular approaches to childbirth were “irrational, indefensible and most preposterously foolish” in treating birth as though “it were some formidable and dangerous malady.”
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Hydropathy took the radical step of naturalizing women's life stages. For hydropaths, puberty, menstruation, childbearing, and menopause were not dread diseases needing intervention but natural processes in a woman's life. Women did not become weak and ill because of their gender but because of some outside cause, just like men. Hydropaths celebrated women's nature and exalted rather than denied their historic role as family and community caretakers. They urged women to take an active role in their own health, and to maximize their health and happiness through diet, exercise, and other hygienic practices, all of which dramatically expanded women's power to determine and control their own lives within the hydropathic worldview.
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As a result, hydropathy provided a refuge for progressive women, and many of America's first generation of women doctors came out of hydropathy.

Encouraging women to get involved in hydropathy contributed to the financial health of the nation's water cures as well. To attract women and their money, hydropaths needed female attendants and
practitioners to serve them. Modesty and the intimate nature of the treatment demanded that women be treated and served only by other women. The large cures had at least one woman physician on staff, and most cures boasted of their male- and female-only bathing facilities in advertisements. A few cures had exclusively female staff and clients. It seemed to work. Women consistently outnumbered men in attendance at hydropathic institutes. It's not hard to imagine why.
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For many women, visiting a water cure was the first, and perhaps only, time their needs were put above those of their husbands and children. As Dr. Silas O. Gleason of the Elmira Water Cure explained, “[T]here was a large class of patients for whom physicians could do little in their home environment. They needed a change of scene, systematic and constant oversight and the most healthful of mental, moral and physical aid, free from the cares and despondency that came of a routine that had grown depressing.”
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Gleason operated his cure with his wife, Rachel Brooks Gleason, a respected doctor in her own right, who counted Mark Twain's wife, Olivia Langdon Clemens, among her patients.
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Writer Harriet Beecher Stowe was among the women who relished the break from her husband, children, and housework when she took the cure at Brattleboro. “Not for years, have I enjoyed life as I have here,” she admitted, “real keen enjoyment—everything agrees with me.” She loved the daily exercise—a real change from simply running after her children—and the companionship of the other women at the cure, which included, for a time, her sister Catharine Beecher. Stowe's husband, Calvin, on the other hand, couldn't wait for her return, reminding her that it had been “almost 18 months since I have had a wife to sleep with me. It is enough to kill any man.”
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Hydropathy's popularity and the glowing testimonials to its curative powers did not mean that taking the cure was always pleasant. Some treatments, especially cold-water enemas, were common practices that few hydropaths discussed openly. That's probably for good reason. For constipation or diarrhea, patients quickly drank at least two pints of water, enough to produce distension of the colon in some people. Sufferers of chronic or acute mucous discharges and other genital conditions received cold injections via a zinc wire straight into the vagina or urethra.
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The wet sheet wasn't always a treat either. One Boston man reported that his sheet froze stiff in less than three minutes during a visit to a cure one winter. Even so, he still reported that it had done him good.
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Worse than the wet sheet was the shower for many patients. At a
time when few people bathed regularly, let alone had ever experienced a shower, a cold hydropathic stream falling from a height of at least ten feet offered a rude introduction. Some patients shouted, struggled, and attempted to run away when the spray hit them. First-timers could be pounded flat by the force of the stream. One English patient recalled being knocked over “like a ninepin.” Another woman tried to lessen the force of the water by standing on a chair to decrease the distance between her head and that of the shower, but the water felled them both. The shower became even more perilous in winter when icicles could form and fall like daggers on the patient below.
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